Monday, 2 May 2016

More barrrel-sized fun

I just remembered something. William Younger always recorded what they racked into in their brewing records.

Which means I can see exactly what sized of barrels they used. The last William Younger logs I have are from 1949-1950. What sorts of barrels were they using? You can probably guess. But here they are:

It says something that the pre-printed form includes butts, but nothing smaller than a quarter hogshead (18 barrels) of half barrel (also 18 barrels). You can see that XXP, a Bitter of 1032º, was only filled into hogsgeads and barrels.

The second beer in the image is No. 3 Bottling. That is, the bottling version of their No.3 Strong Ale (or Scotch Ale, depending on which side of the border you were). It's no conicidence that it was mostly racked into hogsheads. Most wouldn't have been bottled by Younger themselves, but by third party bottlers. Beer was usually delivered to these in hogsheads.

XXPS, a stronger Bitter of 1037º, wasn't filled into hogshead, but barrels, kilderkins and half hogsheads (27 barrels). Logical enough. As a draught beer you'd expect less to have been filled into hogsheads.

The last beer in DBS, Younger's Stout, was racked into a wide variation of cask sizes. They didn't brew a huge amount of DBS, so it might seem strange that some went into hogsheads. But this was another bottled beer. I'm more surprised at the small size of some casks. Presumably relatively low demand meant bottlers took smaller casks than with more popular styles.